Food = Community = Love

You may notice that I have changed the name of this blog from Bent Fork Farm to Olympic Fork. That's because my idea for this blog has grown from telling you about my backyard garden project (which I will still do) to all types of food-related activity here on Washington State's Olympic Peninsula.

I may be an unemployed journalist, but I am still a journalist, and a freelance one at that. So it wasn't long after I started this blog that I had the strong urge to interview other local people about their adventures in growing, cooking, and eating food. By "local," I mean folks anywhere between Port Townsend (where I live) and Sekiu (where Tim lives), which is almost all the way to Neah Bay and Cape Flattery, the northwestern-most point of the contiguous United States. I'll also travel south down the Hood Canal to places like Lilliwaup, an inky-dinky unincorporated town where my mom grew up in the 1920s and '30s.

So, while my backyard project is still called Bent Fork Farm, this blog is wider in scope because, really, food is about community, and on a personal level, it signifies the offering of strength and nourishment to ourselves.

Awesome Asparagus

If you think that I'm developing my mini-farm because I like to eat good food, then you would be correct. I love fresh food. Who doesn't?

Of course I'm excited to get things growing, so it's hard to wait until my entire plot is dug up. Last week, I looked up Sunset magazine's Northwest Checklist February and saw that it's time to set out bare-root asparagus crowns and start sweet pea seeds indoors. I especially love the taste of asparagus and smell of sweet peas, so down to the garden center I went, and home I came with a package of six USDA organic Jersey Knight asparagus crowns from Van Bloem Gardens and a royal family mixture of sweet pea seeds from Ed Hume Seeds. Ed's been a gardening guru around the Pacific Northwest for ages, and he, too, has a blog.

Although I've never grown asparagus before now, it seems like a good place to start this year, not just alphabetically, but because it's almost Valentine's Day and asparagus is supposedly an aphrodisiac. I read where ancient Egyptians offered it to the gods. It's a good source of folate, potassium, and vitamin C, and China, it seems, grows most of the world's supply. In the United States, production is concentrated in California, Michigan, and Washington. Tomatoes are recommended as a companion plant in the garden to repel asparagus beetles.